Better WordPress

People's need is changing everyday, and so is WordPress. From a simple blogging software, WordPress has evolved into a somewhat feature-rich Content Management System. It is, therefore, not a surprise if we, users and developers, always try to do crazy things with WordPress these days, and creating virtual (fake) WordPress pages is simply one of those unusual objectives.

So, what do we need fake pages for anyway? What I find particularly useful about... more

On WordPress.org's Support Forum, there are many questions asked regarding the same topic: How should we modify WordPress's main query to have a fancier output, namely latest posts from each category or latest posts from each post type?

WordPress unfortunately does not provide any built-in function to handle these kinds of tasks, and it can be quite inefficient if we query for posts multiple times on one page, especially if you have a... more

Tag cloud, one of the most popular things in the blogging industry, is taken care of quite well in WordPress. What we got is a function that generates a customizable tag cloud with some configurable parameters such as font size, font unit, sorting order, etc. This function also provides some hooks for us end-users to modify the output to suit our needs.

In this article I would like to show you how to... more

WordPress's Visual Editor, or any WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) editor, is often known for their bad output and the auto-cleaning up problem. If you ask another WordPress user, he or she will most of the time tell you how they hate the Visual Editor and turn it off immediately after installation.

I actually use the Visual Editor a lot, it has 'Visual' in the name for a purpose and... more

It is typical for any WordPress blog owner to have a few (if not many) shortcodes defined in his or her installed theme or plugins. While some shortcodes will work perfectly, some, especially enclosing ones, will not. Most of the time the problems lie at WordPress's built-in formatting functions, famous one of which is wpautop().

There are actually countless support questions and articles about wp_autop() and other formatting functions mangling the contents of... more

Using plugins for your WordPress website or blog is undoubtedly a must, but if you abuse them you might eventually find yourself in tight situations. Many plugins out there are poorly written and eat up a lot of memory, or even if they aren't they simply don't need to be included every single time.

For example, plugins that are designed specifically for the back-end such as TinyMCE Advanced, Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu... more

As a developer and also an end-user, I have been bothered by the same question again and again: How should I organize files within my theme's root and which themes can be considered as well-structured?

If you have read another article named WordPress Themes' Problems and How to Find Good Ones on BetterWP.net, you would know that WordPress Themes have many potential problems and one of which is about theme files' organization. Each... more

A global variable, as it name suggests, is simply a type of variable that is available for use within any fraction of your codes. PHP's global variables and all their glory can be used within WordPress to help you eliminate code duplication, and in some situations save you some database queries.

Even though many developers think that using global variable is simply a bad practice, if you use it the right way there... more

Theme is a great invention, no doubt. But themes, especially free themes or pirated premium themes, also bring many troubles.

How many times have you downloaded a cool-looking WordPress theme just to find out that it doesn't work as expected, or is out of date? Does it even show a blank white page with a nasty fatal error? Does the theme you just bought allow you to customize things via extensive hook support... more